Monday, 7 March 2016

Still Making Space for Indigenous Feminism

The
past decade has seen a growing body of research that focuses on various aspects
of Indigenous peoples’ politics. However, few studies openly engage with
Indigenous feminism(s). Although important, these contributions turn away from
the everyday realities confronting Indigenous women including violence,
exclusion and unequal access to resources and, instead, emphasize forms of
political actions directed at larger systems of domination.

Indigenous
feminist scholars note that colonialism was and continues to be a gendered
process, which has had powerful yet distinctive effects on Indigenous men,
women and LGTBQ people. These scholars argue that gendered, sexualized
violence, discrimination, and unequal access to natural and material resources
are relationally produced and naturalized through social, legal and political processes.
They also question the tendency to uncritically emphasize the needs and
aspirations of a homogeneous collectivity as it reproduces the naturalization
of violence against Indigenous women and LGTBQ2-S individuals. Indigenous
feminism simultaneously aligns with and often contests Indigenous
self-determination and Indigenous women’s activism embedded in this paradox.

When
Indigenous women lead political initiatives that bring their communities into
the national spotlight, such initiatives are appropriated by other community
members in the name of the community. Take for example Indigenous women’s
activism regarding gendered violence. Indigenous women have been mobilizing for
decades to struggle against violence and its invisibility. When support for a
national inquiry on missing and murdered women and girls (MMIWG) started to coalesce, different
voices started to demand the inclusion of missing and murdered Indigenous men. While nobody denies the importance of
investigating crimes against Indigenous men, Indigenous women activists are expressing
concerns that this inclusion would erase, once again, the gendered nature of
widespread violence against Indigenous people.

At
the same time, frameworks appealing to the intervention of the colonial state
reinforce narratives of the Indigenous female victim subject as one who needs
to be protected by the state. This narrative conceals the implication of the
state in creating the conditions for such violence to exist. Indigenous women
are overrepresented in the prison system, and they are more likely to face racialized violence and criminalization; however, these violent
expressions of state regulation are naturalized. The distinctive dynamics of
the current neoliberal regime plays out in ways that exacerbate this
naturalization by emphasizing genderless individuals who experience trauma and
violence resulting from their own failures. When these narratives racialize
people, violence is cast as an outcome of their own cultures. The
transformation of the colonial into the neoliberal state in which recognition, rights, apologies,
and abandonment coexist have worked to produce ambiguous zones of
legality/illegality
among and within communities. Indigenous women’s bodies have become trapped in
these ambiguous zones and are simultaneously disposable and indispensable
elements of the neoliberal state.

Centering
the voices of Indigenous women and girls not only contributes to unsettling
representations of the state-as-savior but also draws attention to the
responsibility of communities in addressing systemic gendered violence and its
different manifestations.

Indigenous
feminism contributes to these urgent goals. However, and perhaps surprisingly,
Indigenous feminism continues to be controversial. The term and its relation to
specific fields of thought remains complicated and this, in part, flows from Eurocentric
colonial histories and normative conceptions of being a woman. The very singular
way in which women’s activism has been understood has produced hierarchies that
erase the history of Indigenous women resisting both colonialism and
patriarchy. Despite these hierarchies and erasures, Indigenous feminism remains
central to projects of decolonization.

Indigenous
feminism(s) insists on the need to gender our analysis in the struggles for
self-determination and decolonization. Being indigenous and woman is interconnected
with everyday lived experiences, land, and worldviews as well as shaped by broader
social power relations within and outside our communities. Thus,
self-determining practices cannot be separated from our bodies and the ways in
which we relate to each other in our everyday lives.

Department of Political Science, University of Alberta

What do political scientists do? Politics is about power, and political science understands the processes, ideas, and institutions through which power is structured, as well as power's effects. Thus, we look at subjects that range from Canadian elections and political parties to the ethics of war and post-conflict management, from the political economy of the global South to theories of justice and citizenship, and from environmental movements to gender relations. In the Department of Political Science, our research and teaching engage with the big questions and with the critical events that shape politics around the world.